Catullus’ Comic Economics: Aufillena Between Comedy and Elegy (Poem 110)
Scholarship on Catullus’ poem 110 usually interprets its situation as follows: Aufillena,
having promised the poem’s speaker sexual favors in exchange for money, has gone back on her
word and in the process violated their contract and her professional ethics as a prostitute (Persson
1914, Fordyce 1961, Quinn 1970, Arkins 1982, Wiseman 1985). In contrast to these biographical
readings, I argue that the poem must be situated within its complex literary context and traditions
and that, rather than a real prostitute, Aufillena is a literary construct modeled on the meretrix or
lena avara (“greedy courtesan” or “greedy madame”) of Roman comedy. The situation described
here draws heavily upon one of the genre’s most common stock-scenes, in which the adulescens
amator (“young lover”), having given gifts and money to a woman, remains sexually unsatisfied
and rebukes her.
Taking my cue from Pedrick (1986) and Skinner (1989), who point out ways in which the
unreliable speaker manipulates his audience, I argue that we must be wary of his one-sided attack
and that Catullus qua poet encourages our skepticism regarding Aufillena’s status by introducing
inconsistencies in her representation elsewhere in the corpus. In poem 100, Aufillena is depicted
as a respectable love interest, while in poem 111 she is an univira (“one-man woman”) whom the
speaker (backhandedly) praises, because “for a woman to live content with one man is worth the
highest praise for brides” (viro contentam vivere solo,
/ nuptarum laus ex laudibus eximiis, 1–
2). She is clearly, then, not a prostitute, despite the insinuations of poem 110’s invective.
Moreover, Forsyth (1981) suggests her name plays on the word lena or “madame,” a female
brothel owner and one of the main antagonists of the adulescens in comedy. This wordplay acts
as a metapoetic marker (a technique common in Augustan poets; Heslin 2011) that points to the
comic lena.
Roman comedy often features the adulescens lamenting that he gives gifts to his girl but
gets nothing in return, and the example of this shtick at Asinaria 153–248 overlaps substantially
with motifs and vocabulary of Catullus’ poem 110. There the adulescens Argyrippus complains
to the lena Cleareta that he gave what they agreed upon (dedi equidem quod mecum egisti, 173),
which the Catullan speaker mirrors by saying that good girls get payment for what they agree to
do (accipiunt pretium, quae facere instituunt, 110.2). Argyrippus moans that when the lena gets
her price, she immediately plots to demand more (quom accepisti, haud multo post aliquid quod
poscas paras, 167); cf. the Catullan speaker’s accusations nec das et fers and data corripere
(110.4, 6). Significantly, both passages discuss erotic relationships in terms of social obligation
(fraudando officiis, 110.7; quid me accusas si facio officium meum?, 173). I argue that this ties
into gendered definitions of “good” vs. “bad” behavior that appear in both Catullus and comedy:
men like Argyrippus and Catullus’ speaker dub women who receive gifts without returning sex
as “bad,” while clever meretrices and lenae claim their obligation as “good” women is to trick
gullible lovers out of as much money as possible. Aufillena, then, is not a prostitute who broke
her contract, but a successful “bad girl,” the quintessential woman of Roman comedy (Anderson
1993).
This financial premise is the same one on which Latin erotic elegy is based (James 1998),
and I conclude by suggesting that Aufillena represents a proto-elegiac puella that bridges the gap
between Roman comedy and elegy, whose allusive relationship has long been recognized (James
1998, Fulkerson 2013). Catullus’ appropriation of comedy’s interest in the economics of erotic
relations in first-person personal poetry thus sets the stage for the elegists in the next generation.
Bibliography
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